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Spotify launches Unlimited and Open accounts

Leading music service du jour Spotify has just added a couple of new account types to the existing Premium and, er, normal configurations.Spotify Unli

18 May 2010/6:00BST

Leading music service du jour Spotify has just added a couple of new account types to the existing Premium and, er, normal configurations.

Spotify Unlimited serves up access to the service’s entire music library for ad-free streaming, and costs £4.99 a month. Sounds a bit like Spotify Premium, right? Well, it’s limited to your computer – there’s no phone or iPod Touch functionality – and that audio quality remains at 192kbps, whereas Premium bumps it to 320kbps. There’s also no access to offline playlists. So there are still a number of reasons why you might want Premium rather than Unlimited.

And what about Spotify Open? Well, this is the mode for anyone who wants to join Spotify now but doesn’t have an invite. It offers ad-supported access to the entire library (over eight million tracks at the time of writing) and allows you to share music with friends, but you’re limited to 20 hours of streaming per month.

Spotify has stated that the regular, invite-only free version of Spotify will not be affected by these new releases.